How to Hire a Social Media Manager in 2026

Hiring a social media manager in 2026 is not as simple as finding someone who can write captions and schedule Instagram posts.

The role has become broader.

A capable social media manager may be responsible for content strategy, short-form video, community management, social search, analytics, creator collaborations, brand reputation, and the responsible use of AI in content workflows.

For small businesses, this creates a hiring challenge.

You probably do not need a huge social media department. But you do need someone who can make good decisions, understand your customers, create consistently, and connect social media activity to real business goals.

The wrong hire can fill your calendar with content without moving the business forward.

The right hire can turn social media from something your team is constantly trying to keep up with into a repeatable marketing channel.

And the opportunity is substantial. DataReportal estimated 254 million active social media user identities in the United States, 500 million in India, and 55.5 million in the United Kingdom in October 2025. These figures represent social media user identities rather than necessarily unique individuals, but they still illustrate the scale of the audiences businesses can potentially reach.

So, how do you find the right person?

This guide walks through how to hire a social media manager in 2026, what to look for, what to ask during interviews, how much to budget, and how to set your new hire up for success.

How to hire a social media manager: the quick answer

Before you start looking at candidates:

1. Define what you want social media to achieve.
2. Decide exactly what the manager will own.
3. Choose between a full-time employee, freelancer, agency, or remote hire.
4. Write a specific job description.
5. Evaluate candidates based on judgment and results, not follower counts.
6. Interview them using situations from your actual business.
7. Give finalists a small paid practical assignment.
8. Agree on measurable goals before they start.
9. Create a clear approval and content workflow.
10. Give them the right social media management tools.

The biggest mistake small businesses make is hiring someone to "manage social media" before deciding what that actually means.

Start with the job, not the candidate.

What does a social media manager do in 2026?

In most small businesses, the role usually covers six areas:

• Strategy: deciding audiences, platforms, content themes, and goals.
• Content: planning, writing, scripting, producing, repurposing, and scheduling posts.
• Community: responding to comments, messages, mentions, complaints, and customer questions.
• Analytics: understanding what worked, what failed, and what to test next.
• Platform awareness: staying current without chasing every trend.
• Operations: managing calendars, approvals, assets, deadlines, publishing, and reporting.

The role varies significantly from one company to another.

At a five-person SaaS company, the social media manager may personally write posts, edit videos, publish content, and respond to comments.

At a larger company, the manager may spend more time developing strategy and coordinating copywriters, designers, video editors, and paid media teams.

For most small businesses, the role includes some combination of the following.

1. Develop the social media strategy

A social media manager should understand why your business is using each platform.

They should be able to answer questions such as:

• Who are we trying to reach?
• Where does that audience spend time?
• What should our brand become known for?
• What types of content are worth creating?
• Which platforms should we prioritize?
• What action do we want people to take after seeing our content?

A good manager makes choices.

A weak manager often recommends publishing everywhere simply because the platforms exist.

For example, a B2B software company may get more value from focusing on LinkedIn, YouTube, and selected short-form video channels than spreading limited resources across seven different platforms.

A local restaurant, ecommerce business, or consumer brand may require a completely different mix.

Your social media manager should be able to explain those trade-offs.

2. Plan and create content

Depending on the role, your manager may be expected to:

• Generate content ideas
• Build a social media content calendar
• Write captions and posts
• Write video scripts
• Create or brief visual assets
• Record or edit short-form videos
• Repurpose existing content
• Schedule posts
• Coordinate campaigns
• Adapt content for different platforms

One important distinction to make during hiring is whether you need a social media manager or an entire content production team.

A person can be an excellent strategist and writer without also being an expert graphic designer, videographer, motion designer, and paid ads specialist.

Be realistic about how many jobs you expect one person to perform.

If short-form video production is central to the role, Create with Viral Suite is built for turning raw ideas into complete, social-ready videos with scripting, story structure, and production handled in one flow.

3. Manage your online community

Social media is not only a publishing channel.

For many businesses, it is also where customers ask questions, complain, recommend products, discover brands, and make buying decisions.

A social media manager may therefore need to:

• Respond to comments
• Answer direct messages
• Monitor mentions
• Engage with relevant accounts
• Identify potential leads
• Escalate support issues
• Handle negative feedback
• Build relationships with customers and creators

If community management is part of the role, define response-time expectations and escalation rules before the manager starts.

Your social media manager should know which questions they can answer independently and which situations require someone else in the business.

4. Measure performance

A good social media manager should be comfortable working with data.

That does not mean creating enormous monthly reports full of charts nobody reads.

It means being able to answer:

• What worked?
• What did not work?
• Why might that have happened?
• What should we test next?

Depending on your business goals, useful metrics might include:

• Reach
• Engagement
• Shares
• Saves
• Video watch time
• Profile visits
• Website clicks
• Leads
• Trial signups
• Sales
• Customer conversations
• Response times

The right metrics depend on the strategy.

A business using social media primarily for awareness should not judge every post by direct sales.

Similarly, a company using LinkedIn primarily to generate qualified leads should not celebrate millions of irrelevant impressions without looking at business outcomes.

5. Keep up with changing platforms

Social platforms, content formats, and audience behavior continue to change.

Your manager should stay informed without chasing every new feature or trend.

There is an important difference between being current and being reactive.

The best social media managers ask:

Is this trend relevant to our audience and brand?

Not:

Everyone else is doing this, so we should too.

6. Run the social media operation

This is one of the least glamorous but most important parts of the job.

Someone needs to manage:

• Content calendars
• Deadlines
• Approvals
• Account permissions
• Creative assets
• Feedback
• Publishing
• Reporting
• Campaign coordination

As your social presence grows, this operational layer becomes increasingly important.

Without a clear system, even a talented social media manager can end up spending too much time chasing approvals, finding files, switching between tools, and asking whether a post is ready to publish.

Manage with Viral Suite is built for that operational layer: planning, scheduling, review, approvals, publishing workflows, collaboration, and high-level performance signals in one connected system.

When should you hire a social media manager?

Common signs that it may be time to hire:

• Your posting has become inconsistent.
• Social media is taking too much founder or owner time.
• Comments and messages are being ignored.
• You are publishing without a clear strategy.
• You are expanding into more markets, languages, or time zones.
• You cannot tell whether social media is actually working.

You do not necessarily need a dedicated manager as soon as you create your first social account.

Many small-business owners can manage social media themselves in the early stages.

The question is when that stops being the best use of their time.

Here are some common signs.

Your posting is inconsistent

You post actively during launches, disappear for three weeks, publish again when someone remembers, and repeat the cycle.

If social media matters to your marketing strategy, inconsistent ownership eventually becomes a problem.

Social media is taking too much of the founder's time

Founders often understand their customers better than anyone else, which can make them excellent sources of content.

That does not mean they need to personally schedule every post.

A strong social media manager can extract ideas and expertise from the founder while taking over the operational workload.

Comments and messages are being ignored

As your audience grows, so does the workload around it.

Unanswered questions can become missed sales opportunities or poor customer experiences.

You are creating content without a clear strategy

Publishing more content is not automatically better.

A social media manager can bring structure by defining your audiences, themes, platforms, formats, goals, and measurement approach.

You are expanding into more markets

Managing social media becomes more complicated when audiences span different countries, cultures, languages, and time zones.

The same creative idea may need different execution for customers in New York, London, Mumbai, Toronto, or Sydney.

You cannot tell whether social media is working

If your only measure of success is follower count, you probably need a clearer strategy and reporting process.

Step 1: Define what you want social media to achieve

Before writing a job description, define the business outcomes you want.

For example:

Goal 1: Increase awareness among small-business owners in the United States.

Goal 2: Generate more qualified visits and product trials from social content.

Goal 3: Establish a consistent publishing system across LinkedIn, Instagram, and other priority channels.

These goals tell candidates much more than:

We need someone to grow our social media and make viral content.

Be specific about what success looks like.

Your goals might include:

• Building awareness
• Generating leads
• Increasing ecommerce sales
• Growing a professional community
• Supporting customers
• Building the founder's personal brand
• Promoting a local business
• Increasing app or SaaS signups

You may have several goals, but there should be a clear priority.

Step 2: Decide exactly what the manager will own

"Social media manager" is one of those job titles that can mean almost anything.

Create a clear scope before hiring.

Decide whether the person will be responsible for:

Strategy

Will they create the strategy or simply execute one you already have?

Content creation

Will they write posts?

Create graphics?

Film videos?

Edit videos?

Or coordinate specialists who handle production?

Publishing

How many platforms will they manage?

How frequently do you expect to publish?

Community management

Will they respond to every comment and direct message?

During which hours?

Analytics

How often should they report performance?

Which metrics matter?

Paid social

Will they run advertising campaigns?

Do not automatically include paid advertising just because it happens on social platforms. Organic social management and performance advertising require overlapping but different skills.

Influencer or creator partnerships

Will they manage outreach and collaborations?

Once you have answered these questions, you will have a much clearer picture of the person you actually need.

Step 3: Choose the right hiring model

There are four common ways small businesses hire social media talent.

Full-time social media manager

A full-time employee makes sense when social media requires consistent daily attention and the person needs to become deeply embedded in your company.

Best for:

• Companies with significant content volume
• Brands with active online communities
• Businesses where social is a major acquisition channel
• Teams that need close collaboration

Advantages:

• Deep knowledge of the company
• Greater availability
• Easier collaboration
• Long-term ownership

Disadvantages:

• Higher fixed cost
• Longer hiring process
• You may still need separate creative specialists

Freelance social media manager

Freelancers can be an excellent option for small businesses with a clearly defined workload.

Best for:

• Small teams
• Limited platform requirements
• Flexible workloads
• Businesses testing social media investment

Advantages:

• Flexible
• Lower commitment
• Access to specialist expertise

Disadvantages:

• Availability may be limited
• One person may manage multiple clients
• Processes need to be documented carefully

Social media agency

An agency can provide several skills under one contract.

Best for:

• Businesses needing strategy and production
• Multi-channel campaigns
• Teams without internal marketing resources

Advantages:

• Access to multiple specialists
• Easier to scale production
• Less dependency on one person

Disadvantages:

• Can be more expensive
• Less direct access to the person doing the work
• Smaller clients may receive less senior attention

Ask exactly who will manage your account after you sign.

Remote or international hire

Remote hiring gives small businesses access to a much larger talent pool.

A US company, for example, might hire someone in India, the UK, Canada, the Philippines, Europe, or another market.

The candidate does not necessarily need to live in the same country as your customers.

They do need to understand them.

Evaluate:

• Writing ability
• Cultural understanding
• Customer knowledge
• Time-zone overlap
• Communication
• Reliability

Hire for your audience and operating needs, not simply for geography.

Hiring social media managers in the US, India, and other major markets

Before comparing countries, evaluate five things:

• Customer understanding
• Writing quality
• Cultural fluency
• Time-zone overlap
• Compensation expectations

The strongest option is not always the cheapest location. It is the person or team that understands your market and can operate reliably inside your workflow.

Location can affect compensation, availability, language, cultural context, and working hours.

It should inform your decision without becoming the only factor.

Hiring in the United States

A US-based social media manager can be particularly useful when your business needs:

• Strong understanding of American audiences
• US business-hour coverage
• Familiarity with local culture and events
• Frequent collaboration with a US-based team

According to Indeed's salary data, the average base salary for a social media manager in the United States was approximately $64,362 per year, based on job postings from the previous 36 months and updated July 12, 2026. This is an employee salary benchmark rather than an estimate of what freelancers or agencies charge.

Hiring in India

India offers a large talent pool for both domestic and international companies.

It may be particularly attractive to businesses looking for remote social media talent or teams targeting India's large and diverse digital audience.

Indeed reported an average base salary of approximately ₹21,101 per month for social media managers in India, based on 551 salaries and updated May 24, 2026. Again, this is a broad employee salary average and can vary significantly based on city, experience, industry, and responsibility.

When hiring an India-based manager for an international audience, test their ability to write specifically for that market.

Excellent English alone does not guarantee that someone understands how your US, UK, or Australian customers communicate.

The reverse is equally true: a foreign manager targeting India needs to understand local context rather than treating the country as one uniform market.

Hiring in the United Kingdom

For UK-focused brands, language and cultural fluency can matter significantly.

A manager working across both US and UK audiences should understand that localization goes beyond changing spelling.

Indeed reported an average UK base salary of approximately £34,190 per year, based on 1.6k salaries and updated June 29, 2026.

Hiring in Canada, Australia, and other markets

Canada and Australia can be strong sources of English-speaking social media talent, particularly for businesses serving customers in those regions.

For internationally distributed teams, time zones may be as important as location.

The key question is not:

Which country has the cheapest social media managers?

It is:

Where can we find someone who understands our customers and can operate effectively within our budget and workflow?

Step 4: Write a better social media manager job description

Generic job descriptions attract generic applications.

Include the following information.

About the business

Explain:

• What you sell
• Who you sell to
• Your primary markets
• Your stage of growth

The role

List exactly what the person will own.

For example:

You will own our organic social media strategy across LinkedIn and Instagram, create and schedule weekly content, coordinate creative assets, manage community engagement, and report monthly performance.

That is much clearer than:

Manage all social media activities.

Expected output

Give candidates a realistic idea of workload.

For example:

• 4 LinkedIn posts per week
• 3 Instagram posts or Reels per week
• Daily community checks
• Monthly performance report

Do not artificially inflate the posting volume to make the job sound ambitious.

Quality and strategic relevance matter more than filling every available publishing slot.

Success metrics

Explain how you will evaluate the role.

Required skills

Separate genuine requirements from nice-to-have skills.

Requiring ten years of experience across every major social network will eliminate good candidates without necessarily improving your hiring outcome.

Step 5: Know what to look for in a candidate

The best candidates usually combine creative and analytical skills.

Here are eight qualities worth evaluating.

1. Strategic thinking

Ask:

If you joined our company tomorrow, which two platforms would you prioritize and why?

Good candidates make choices.

They should be able to explain who they are trying to reach and why a particular platform deserves investment.

2. Strong writing

Social media managers still spend a significant amount of time communicating through words.

They may need to write:

• Hooks
• Captions
• Scripts
• Comments
• Briefs
• Calls to action

Review actual writing samples.

3. Good content judgment

Anyone can generate 100 content ideas with AI.

The valuable skill is knowing which five ideas are worth publishing.

Ask candidates to review several potential ideas and prioritize them.

Pay attention to their reasoning.

4. Platform knowledge

Candidates should understand the platforms that matter to your business.

But do not overvalue knowledge of individual features.

Platforms change.

Good strategic judgment lasts longer.

5. Analytical ability

A strong manager should be able to look at performance data and turn it into action.

The process should look something like:

Data → insight → hypothesis → test

Ask candidates to explain what they would investigate if engagement suddenly declined.

6. Community instincts

Give them a realistic customer comment or complaint.

Ask how they would respond.

You are evaluating judgment as much as writing ability.

7. AI literacy

AI tools can help with brainstorming, research, drafts, repurposing, and repetitive workflow tasks.

But a social media manager still needs to apply judgment.

One of the best questions you can ask in 2026 is:

Which parts of your social media workflow would you use AI for, and which parts would you keep human-led?

Be cautious of both extremes.

Someone who refuses to use productivity tools may work inefficiently.

Someone who wants to automate everything may struggle to create a distinctive brand.

8. Operational reliability

Social media is creative work, but it is also deadline-driven work.

Look for people who can:

• Maintain calendars
• Follow processes
• Organize assets
• Meet deadlines
• Handle feedback
• Document decisions

Creativity matters.

Consistency makes creativity useful.

Step 6: Ask better social media manager interview questions

Avoid predictable questions such as:

Are you passionate about social media?

Instead, put candidates into realistic situations.

Which social platforms would you prioritize for our business?

Tests strategic thinking.

What would your first 30 days here look like?

Look for candidates who want to learn and audit before completely changing everything.

Show me a brand whose social media you admire. Why does it work?

Tests taste and analysis.

Tell me about a post or campaign that underperformed.

The best candidates should be comfortable discussing failures.

Listen for what they learned.

How would you turn one customer interview into a week of content?

Tests repurposing and creativity.

What information would you need from us to create better content?

Strong candidates often ask for access to:

• Customers
• Founders
• Product knowledge
• Sales insights
• Customer support questions
• Performance data

They understand that great social content rarely comes from staring at an empty content calendar.

What would you automate in your workflow?

This reveals how candidates think about efficiency.

How would you handle this negative customer comment?

Give them a real example relevant to your business.

This tests judgment under pressure.

Step 7: Give finalists a paid practical test

A portfolio shows what a candidate has done.

A practical assignment shows how they think about your business.

Keep the assignment small and pay candidates for meaningful work.

For example:

Create a one-week social media plan for our business. Include five content ideas, write two complete posts, and explain which metrics you would use to evaluate performance.

Evaluate candidates on:

• Understanding of your business
• Quality of ideas
• Writing
• Strategic reasoning
• Platform awareness
• Attention to detail

Avoid asking candidates to create a full month of usable content for free.

A hiring assignment should assess ability, not become a source of unpaid production.

Step 8: Use a hiring scorecard

Interviews can become subjective very quickly.

Create a simple scorecard before meeting candidates.

You might evaluate each person from 1 to 5 on:

• Strategic thinking
• Writing
• Creativity
• Audience understanding
• Analytics
• Communication
• Platform knowledge
• Reliability
• AI literacy
• Relevant experience

You can adjust the weighting based on the role.

For example, a social media manager for a B2B SaaS company may need stronger writing and industry understanding.

A consumer brand producing daily short-form videos may prioritize creative production skills.

Using the same scorecard for every candidate makes comparison much easier.

How much does it cost to hire a social media manager?

Cost depends mainly on:

• Location
• Experience
• Employment model
• Platform count
• Content volume
• Video production needs
• Community workload
• Strategy responsibility
• Paid advertising or influencer responsibilities

There is no universal price.

A person scheduling three finished posts per week is performing a very different role from someone responsible for your strategy, copywriting, video production, engagement, analytics, and campaigns.

Do not start with:

What is the cheapest social media manager we can find?

Start with:

What level of ownership do we need this person to take?

Then build a budget around the actual job.

Also avoid comparing full-time salary data directly with freelancer retainers or agency fees.

They represent different working arrangements and cost structures.

Step 9: Define success before the manager starts

Do not hire someone and tell them to "grow the socials."

Create a small set of useful KPIs.

If your goal is brand awareness

Consider:

• Relevant reach
• Shares
• Video consumption
• Brand mentions
• Audience growth

If your goal is community

Consider:

• Meaningful conversations
• Response time
• Repeat engagement
• Community participation

If your goal is lead generation

Consider:

• Qualified website traffic
• Leads
• Demo requests
• Trial signups
• Social-assisted conversions

If your goal is better operations

Consider:

• Publishing consistency
• Approval turnaround time
• Content produced
• Missed deadlines
• Time spent managing the workflow

Do not judge a social media manager entirely by follower growth.

The easiest audience to grow is not always the audience most likely to become a customer.

Step 10: Give your social media manager a good operating system

Hiring the right person is only half the job.

You also need to create an environment where they can work effectively.

Your social media process should make it easy to answer:

• What are we publishing?
• When is it going live?
• Who needs to approve it?
• Where is the final creative?
• What feedback is outstanding?
• Which accounts are connected?
• What performed well?
• What should we create next?

Without a system, teams often end up managing social media through a mixture of spreadsheets, documents, chat messages, email threads, file-storage folders, and individual platform logins.

That creates unnecessary administrative work.

Viral Suite helps reduce this operational friction by bringing the social media workflow into one more centralized system:

• Create turns ideas into scripted, social-ready videos.
• Manage supports planning, scheduling, reviews, approvals, publishing workflows, collaboration, and performance signals.
• Market supports influencer discovery, campaign management, reporting, and organized creator payment workflows.

The goal of the software is not to replace the social media manager.

The goal is to help the manager spend less time coordinating repetitive tasks and more time doing higher-value work:

• Understanding customers
• Developing ideas
• Improving content
• Engaging audiences
• Learning from performance

A good social media manager with a bad workflow will eventually become frustrated.

A good manager with a clear system can move much faster.

A simple 30-day onboarding plan for your new social media manager

Week 1: Learn

Give them access to:

• Your products or services
• Brand guidelines
• Existing social accounts
• Previous content
• Analytics
• Customer personas
• Customer reviews
• Competitor information
• Sales insights

Introduce them to key people inside the company.

Week 2: Audit

Ask them to evaluate:

• Current channels
• Best-performing content
• Weak-performing content
• Audience
• Competitors
• Content gaps
• Existing workflows

They should be able to identify a small number of high-priority opportunities.

Week 3: Plan

Agree on:

• Priority platforms
• Content themes
• Publishing frequency
• Approval process
• Community rules
• KPIs

Build the first content calendar.

Week 4: Publish and learn

Start executing.

Do not expect your entire social media presence to transform in four weeks.

The first month should establish a strong working system and generate information that improves the next month.

Common mistakes to avoid when hiring a social media manager

Avoid these mistakes first:

• Hiring based on personal follower count.
• Asking one person to do the work of a full marketing department.
• Choosing purely based on the lowest price.
• Giving the manager no access to internal business knowledge.
• Changing strategy every week.
• Having no clear approval owner or publishing process.

Hiring based on their personal follower count

Building a personal creator account and managing a business account are not the same job.

A large following can be relevant experience, but it should not replace evidence of strategic thinking.

Asking one person to do six jobs

Be cautious when your job description requires one candidate to be an expert:

• Strategist
• Copywriter
• Designer
• Videographer
• Video editor
• Community manager
• Influencer manager
• Paid advertising specialist

At some point, you are no longer hiring one social media manager.

You are trying to hire a marketing department.

Hiring purely based on the lowest price

Low cost does not necessarily mean good value.

A cheaper hire who requires constant direction can cost the founder more time than a stronger candidate who works independently.

Giving them no access to the business

Your manager cannot create genuinely differentiated content if their only source of information is your homepage.

Give them access to your company's knowledge.

Changing strategy every week

Social media requires experimentation.

It also requires enough consistency to learn from those experiments.

One unsuccessful post is not a reason to rebuild the entire strategy.

Having no approval system

When five people can give feedback but nobody has final authority, content gets stuck.

Assign a clear decision-maker.

Final checklist: before you hire a social media manager

Before making an offer, ask:

• Have we defined our goals?
• Do we know which platforms the manager will own?
• Is the workload realistic?
• Have we clearly defined content responsibilities?
• Have we reviewed relevant work samples?
• Have we tested strategic thinking?
• Can this person communicate in our brand voice?
• Do they understand our target audience?
• Have we discussed AI expectations?
• Are working hours clear?
• Have we defined success metrics?
• Do we have an approval process?
• Do we have the right tools and workflow?

If several answers are no, fix the hiring system before blaming the candidate pool.

Final thoughts: hire the person, then build the system around them

The core idea is simple:

• Hire for strategy, creativity, judgment, and reliability.
• Give the manager clear goals and realistic expectations.
• Provide access to customers, product knowledge, and performance data.
• Set a clear approval and publishing process.
• Support the role with tools that reduce coordination work.

Hiring a social media manager in 2026 is not about finding someone to "handle Instagram."

You are hiring someone who may represent your company publicly, translate business expertise into content, engage with customers, analyze performance, and help your brand compete for attention.

Look for someone who combines:

Strategy + creativity + judgment + reliability.

But remember that even an excellent manager will struggle inside a broken process.

Give your social media manager:

• Clear goals
• Realistic expectations
• Access to the business
• Useful feedback
• A defined approval process
• The right social media management software

That combination is what turns social media from a constant scramble into a repeatable business function.

With the right person and a well-organized workflow supported by a platform like Viral Suite, your business can spend less time coordinating social media work and more time creating content your customers actually want to see.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does a social media manager do?

A social media manager plans and executes a company's social media activity. Depending on the role, this can include strategy, content planning, writing, publishing, community management, analytics, reporting, campaigns, and coordinating creative production.

When should a small business hire a social media manager?

Consider hiring when social media is becoming inconsistent, customer conversations are being missed, your team lacks a clear strategy, you are expanding to more platforms, or managing social media is taking too much time away from other important work.

Should I hire a freelancer or a full-time social media manager?

A freelancer may be a better choice when you need flexibility or have a clearly defined workload. A full-time employee often makes more sense when social media requires daily ownership and deep involvement in the business.

Can a US company hire a social media manager from India?

Yes. The candidate's location is less important than whether they understand your target audience, can communicate in the right brand voice, work reliably with your team, and provide sufficient time-zone overlap. A practical paid assignment is one of the best ways to evaluate this.

What skills should I look for in a social media manager?

Look for strategic thinking, strong writing, good content judgment, relevant platform knowledge, analytical ability, community-management skills, AI literacy, communication, and operational reliability.

Should a social media manager know how to use AI?

AI literacy is useful for modern social media work, particularly for research, brainstorming, repurposing, and repetitive tasks. However, the manager should also know where human judgment, originality, customer knowledge, and editorial review are necessary.

How should I interview a social media manager?

Ask candidates to solve realistic problems related to your business. Have them prioritize platforms, analyze content, explain an underperforming campaign, respond to a customer situation, and describe what they would do during their first 30 days.

Should I give candidates a social media test?

For serious finalists, a small paid assignment can be extremely useful. Keep it focused enough to evaluate their thinking without asking for significant free work.

How do I measure a social media manager's performance?

Choose metrics that match your business objectives. Depending on the role, this could include relevant reach, engagement, website traffic, leads, sales, customer conversations, response time, or publishing consistency.

What tools does a social media manager need?

Most managers need tools for planning, publishing, collaboration, asset management, and performance analysis. A social media management platform such as Viral Suite can help organize the workflow and reduce the amount of time spent moving between disconnected systems.